Read Spheres of Influence-eARC Online

Authors: Ryk E. Spoor

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Space Opera, #Action & Adventure, #General

Spheres of Influence-eARC (6 page)

BOOK: Spheres of Influence-eARC
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“But these
aren’t
ordinary circumstances,” said Ariane grimly. “
We
have one of the Great Factions essentially at war with us, and another that won’t mind at all taking us down about five notches. If we piss away too much time and energy with internal power plays, the Molothos are going to find our Sphere, occupy the Upper Sphere with a LOT of troops, and then…I don’t know, exactly, maybe begin building up some huge force to invade our actual system in normal space, but whatever they do next won’t be good. And then our Sphere is suddenly only about a quarter as useful—the Upper Sphere will have to be sealed, and we can bet those bastards will have the Straits blockaded.”

She ran her hand through her hair distractedly. “Wonderful. Well…look, right now I think all we can do is try to keep an eye out for what kind of maneuvers our politically oriented friends might try, and hope that we can use our superior knowledge of the Arena to keep them from being more than a nuisance.”

“Amen to that,” DuQuesne said emphatically. “Which is one of the main reasons I wanted to get Wu here.”

Something in his tone—something almost…
gleeful
?—made her glance at DuQuesne sharply. “What? How’s he going to address political maneuvers?”

“I’m going to be your bodyguard,” Wu Kung explained helpfully.

“My…
what?”
The word was grotesque, an anachronism centuries dead except in simgames. With AISages and directed automated monitoring, it was
difficult
to threaten people and get away with it. She blinked and looked at Marc—trying to ignore Simon, whose face was so utterly blank that she just
knew
he was restraining an ungentlemanly guffaw at her shock. “
Doctor
DuQuesne,” she said, “I would like to talk with you. Privately.”

She started towards the rear of
Holy Grail
, where there would be unoccupied space…and realized Sun Wu Kung was following her. “Wu—”

“I can’t be a bodyguard if I’m not here.” Wu said bluntly.

“A bodyguard against
DuQuesne?
” Now she heard
Saul
stifle a chortle, and Gabrielle’s hand was over her mouth; her AISage Vincent was unabashedly grinning like a man watching his favorite comedy.

“Against whoever might want to hurt you. Just because DuQuesne assigned me doesn’t mean I’m ignoring him as a threat.”

She goggled at him in entirely un-captainlike disbelief, then turned her stare towards DuQuesne, whose beard was not quite successfully concealing a smile. “Is he serious?”

“Very serious indeed, Captain. Which is why I chose him for that.”

It finally registered. “You mean that
this
is why you went all the way out there to
wake him up?
To be a
bodyguard?”

“Not the
only
reason,” DuQuesne clarified, “but a major reason, yes. And before you start telling me how little you need one, I want to point out that we were just discussing how part of the Bad Old Days is coming back in force, and how the Arena isn’t the safest place in the universe either. Right now, Captain, you are the single most important human being ever, and that in at least two ways.”

I should know better than to argue with a Hyperion, but that’s never stopped me before.
“Two ways?”

“The obvious first reason is that you’re the head of the Faction of Humanity—or, let’s be more blunt, the ruler of all humanity as far as the Arena is concerned—for exactly as long as you’re alive, or until you deliberately give that position up.”

Saul murmured something. “I had…wondered about certain aspects of your report. My God.”

“Yeah, and I figured there wasn’t much point in hiding it from
you
any more. Sure as hell we can’t keep it hidden from
them
much longer. And I don’t think any of us need to ask Naraj and Ni Deng about
their
feelings on
that
subject; the idea that you, and you alone, are authorized to make major decisions for the entire human species? Ha! Oh, sure,
they
might not do anything about it directly, but believe you me, there’s probably a dozen others that, once they figure out the situation, might think it’s a real problem that could be cleared up with a strategically-placed suicide drone with a load of explosives. Perhaps even to assist Naraj or Ni Deng with plausible deniability. ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome captain?’, so to speak.”

“Wouldn’t the Arena—”

“—know? Sure. And I don’t think it
cares
. Oh, I don’t think it’d accept a transfer of authority that was tortured out of you or blackmailed out of you, though I wouldn’t want to bet that a Shadeweaver couldn’t get away with his mind-woogie doing the same thing—if you hadn’t been so smart as to cut
that
off at the pass. But you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s not gonna give one tiny ram’s damn about something like assassination that’s purely ‘in the family.” How we run our politics is our business.”

Much as she hated to admit it, he had a point. There might well be people willing to kill her over stuff like this. “You said in two ways…oh.”

“Yeah. You’re also the first, and right now only, human with those weird powers the Shadeweavers and Initiate Guides have. They’re sealed away—for now—and you don’t know how to use them—yet—and that makes you a Problem for a lot of people, both here and back in the Arena.”

“All right, maybe I
do
need a bodyguard. No offense, Marc, but…is he really
that
good?”

The huge Hyperion burst out laughing, Saul following suit, as Wu looked down modestly. “Is he that good? Ariane…Captain…I’ll let him give you a demonstration sometime, maybe when we get back to the Arena, where I can be sure that the only spy looking over my shoulder
is
the Arena. But yeah.
Better
than that, even.”

She glanced at Wu. “Wu, sorry about my…issues here. But it’s just hard for me to imagine that I’d need a bodyguard at all.”

“I understand. But DuQuesne says you need one, so you do, and I’m going to do that job.”

Fine
. “Okay.
BUT
we will do this
my
way.” She made her face look hard and used her most forceful tone.
As if any tone I use is likely to impress a Hyperion.
“There will be times I have to speak to people privately, here and in the Arena, and I
will
speak with them privately, which means without you present. And when I go to my private quarters they will
remain
my
private
quarters, whether you like it or not. And that goes for you
AND
Dr. Marc C. Hyperion Superman DuQuesne. Have I made myself clear?”

For a second neither of them responded; to her surprise they were staring at her almost like two students being reprimanded, and Saul Maginot as well, his mouth half-open in shock. “Crystal-clear, Captain.” DuQuesne said finally, not a trace of his frequent sardonic humor present.

“Very
very
clear, Captain Ariane! DuQuesne, she is
scary
like that! I like her!”

Ariane found it very hard to keep from laughing, but she managed to keep her face straight—though it took heroic effort, and from the sound of things Gabrielle wasn’t finding it easy either. “Then in that case, Wu Kung, I need to talk to DuQuesne alone.” She turned towards the aft door, grabbing up Mentor’s case as she did so.

“Yes,
sir!
…I mean,
Ma’am
…” Looking slightly confused at which term of address to use, Wu Kung backed off.

DuQuesne followed her through the door.

She giggled after it shut. “He’s awfully sweet, you know?”

DuQuesne’s expression softened. “Yeah. Why do you think he was our heart, so to speak? Not the leader, not the smartest, but the one no one could really dislike.”

“Hard to see him as so dangerous, then. But enough of that for now.” She sat back down, gesturing for DuQuesne to do the same; he settled in, somewhat warily, across from her. “Marc, I wanted to talk to you about a lot of things once we got back, but what just happened…changes things.”

DuQuesne nodded. “Hyperion.”

“Exactly.” She looked at him sympathetically. “I know—now more than I did—how hard it is to look at parts of that past, Marc. I know I can’t even begin to imagine what you really went through, probably not even what people like Saul went through. And I’d hoped that we could pretty much leave it at that, at going to find the survivors that could help us and—”

“Don’t worry about my feelings here, Captain,” he said.

Not possible. I care about you…a lot more than I would have thought, Marc C. DuQuesne. There isn’t much of a chance I won’t worry about your feelings.

On the other hand, she also was quite capable of
acting
as though she could. “All right.” Since he was now in formal mode, she shifted gears. “Dr. DuQuesne, it’s become clear that Hyperion’s legacy is less and less in the past, and more and more in the present. From what Saul said, the coverup—deliberate and otherwise—has wiped out more records than I had imagined possible, so obviously you can’t just tap a database and dump the details to me and Mentor. But I really don’t feel that we can safely go forward without understanding—without
really
understanding—what we’re dealing with, both with this Maria-Susanna and with the other Hyperions. And with you, for that matter.”

She saw an almost imperceptible twitch. “Yes, I know that goes against your grain, Dr. DuQuesne, but as Simon might say we’ve already got an incredible number of unknowns in this Arena equation; I don’t need my own people putting more X’s in my calculations.” She reached out and touched his hand, shifting gears again.
And I’m perfectly aware of the effect. And he’s probably aware that I’m doing this deliberately.

And it’ll still work
. “Marc…Hyperion’s legacy has been
driving
everything almost since we arrived. Maybe before.
That’s
one of the reasons you joined in the first place, isn’t it?”

DuQuesne’s gaze was almost amused as she began, but by the time she reached the end of her question the smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were gone. He looked down at his hands, then gripped hers gently. “You’ve…come to know me pretty well, I guess. Yeah. And it’s not as simple as one reason, either.” He looked distant. “Having somewhere to go that I
wouldn’t
be watched, that’s always been important—even before I realized my life had been nothing but someone else’s live-action entertainment. But…” Now he did smile. “But, you know, there’s also the fact that Marc C. DuQuesne, no matter which version, was a traveller, an adventurer, an explorer. And I wasn’t just DuQuesne—I was Seaton’s equal and friend, Marc DuQuesne combined with M. Reynolds Crane, and we were also both…well, Samms and Kinnison, too, in a way.

“What I mean is, that a chance to be on the first FTL ship? That wasn’t even a
question
for me, Ariane. That
was
me. That was what…what me and Rich
did
. We built the Skylark not just for the military, not just to test theories, we did it to do something no one else had ever done and see the universe that no one else had seen.” There was a glitter in his eyes that shimmered like water, and his voice trembled slightly. “Dammit, yes, it was all a lie, it never happened…but by God that’s
me
. It’s still me, Ariane, and somehow…I guess somehow being there, on that first trip…it was almost as if that proved that it
wasn’t
really a lie. The details, yes…but the soul, no. And it was, I guess, a way of making peace with Seaton—saying that I’ve done it for real, just like we always meant to.” He looked up. “If that makes any sense.”

Hell yes.
“Yes, Marc. It does. And I don’t want you to ever doubt how much we owe you—owe Hyperion, with all its twisted legacy. If you hadn’t been along, if you hadn’t been what you were, I sincerely believe we might never have gotten home. But, Marc, I have to
count
on you as my second in command. I have to know what’s in your past that might jump out at us. We
need
you, Dr. Marc Cassius DuQuesne—I won’t lie about that. Honestly? You
could
keep every possible secret and I still wouldn’t kick out out of the crew; I can’t afford to, not going up against the Molothos and Amas-Garao and the Blessed and who
knows
what else—plus your former teammate Maria-Susanna. But I really, really want to know everything I can about Hyperion so it
can’t
bushwhack us again—because my gut tells me that that fifty-year-old atrocity isn’t even
close
to done with us, or the Arena. Do you understand me?”

“Loud and clear and I check you to the proverbial nine decimals, Captain,” he said emphatically. “Captain—Ariane—I’ll do what I can. But you’re right; most of Hyperion was destroyed. It was self-contained, backups were maintained but were mostly on-site—and the off-site backups were destroyed very deliberately when things went sour. No, not by the designers,” he said at her puzzled glance. “By some of the rogue AIs. You know what kind of monsters the heroes would have had to fight against; well, all those AIs were
not happy at all
, to put it mildly, to find out they were just simulations for the entertainment of a bunch of lotus-eating amateurs. That was one of the reasons that the CSF, or what
became
the CSF, pretty much finished the obliteration of Hyperion.”

She
did
shudder then, because if the Hyperion designers had succeeded this well in making their heroes, they must have been equally adept at creating their nemeses. “I see. All right, Marc. Do what you can. Especially give me everything you can on Maria-Susanna; that’s our immediate problem, and knowing everything we can about her is really our only weapon right now.”

He nodded. “Then I’d better get started.” He turned to the door as he spoke. “There’s some stuff I’m going to need to download—scattered caches of info I put together years ago, in widely separated places. But I’ll have it for us by the time we get back to the Arena.”

“Do it fast, Marc; we’re leaving as soon as we can. Thank you, Marc.”

“You can count on me, Ariane. Always.” He gave a short bow and exited. As he left, Wu Kung glanced in; she smiled and nodded as she clipped the turtle-shell-like case of her AISage back onto her belt; she realized she’d been holding it in her one hand the whole time.

BOOK: Spheres of Influence-eARC
2.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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